Open Stack

Hi there!

As discussions are underway for planning the Ops meetup during the 
second half of the year, I wanted to reach out with some thoughts and to 
see how the Foundation staff can help. We are committed to supporting 
the Ops community and want you all to know that it continues to be a 
major priority for the Foundation.

UC Update
We've been meeting regularly with the User Committee to help establish 
goals for the Committee as well as Operators and End Users.  There are 
three critical things that we identified as immediate areas of concern:

  * How to involve operators, end users, and app-devs that are not in
    the normal cycle of communications within the community (IRC, MLs,
    Summit, Forum, etc..)
  * Ensuring a productive communication loop between the User and Dev
    communities so feedback from OS Days, local user groups, and Ops
    Meetups are communicated and brought to the Forum in a way that
    allows developers to address concerns in future  release cycles.
  * Removing perceived barriers and building relationships between User
    and Dev communities


General Feedback from Ops Meetups
We're starting to lay the groundwork to address some of these concerns, 
but we need feedback from the Ops community before moving forward.  Some 
of the feedback we've gotten from operators is they don't see their 
needs being met during release cycles. We're hoping you can help us 
answer a few questions and see if we can figure out a way to improve:

  * What are the short and long term goals for Ops Meetups?
  * Do you feel like the existing format is helping to achieve those goals?
  * How can the OpenStack Foundation staff work to support your efforts?


Ops 2H 2018 Meetup
In addition to those questions, we'd like to pitch an option for you for 
the next Ops Meetup.  The upcoming PTG is the week of September 10 in 
North America. We have an opportunity to co-locate the Ops Meetup at the 
PTG.

If the Ops community was interested in this, we would have separate 
space with your own work sessions and separate branding for the Ops 
attendees. This would also involve updating the language on the 
OpenStack website and potentially renaming the PTG to something more 
inclusive to both groups.

Evenings at a co-located event would allow for relationship building and 
problem sharing. We're pitching this as a way to bring these two groups 
together, while still allowing them to have distinct productive events.  
That said, we're in no way trying to force the situation. If, as a 
group, you decide you'd prefer to continue managing these events on your 
own, we're happy to support that in whatever way we can.

If you have an opinion one way or the other, please weigh in here: 
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/OpsMeetup2H2018

Events and Communication
Regardless of the location of the event the second half of this year, we 
would like to continue refining the feedback loop and determine how 
ambassadors, user group leaders and OpenStack Days play into the mix. We 
plan to have Forum sessions in Vancouver and Berlin and encourage all 
Users to attend to discuss ways that we can provide more meaningful 
discussion between Ops and Devs. Generally, we’ve been discussing a 
communication architecture around events:

  * OpenStack Days - Having an Ops track at OpenStack Days in an effort
    to solicit feedback and open discussion from operators, especially
    those who might normally not attend other events. The goal here is
    to generate common operator issues and features, and also share best
    practices. The Public Cloud WG has been successfully pioneering this
    approach at several OpenStack Days last year.
  * Ops Meetup - Take the content generated by all of the OpenStack Days
    Ops tracks and use them to narrow down how the Ops and Dev
    communities can get the software to do what it should. The result is
    a focused list of topics that we can use to create Forum sessions.
    There are also opportunities to share and document knowledge, talk
    about technology integration and best practices.
  * Forum - Using the content generated through the prior two, we
    propose sessions and discussions held at the Forum to funnel that
    feedback directly to the dev community and collaborate with them.


This is again why I think there is some value in at least trying out the 
PTG for a cycle or two, even if it's ultimately decided it isn't fruitful.

I realize this is a lot to absorb.  Please review with relevant parties 
and let us know your thoughts.  The only catch on the PTG is we would 
need a decision by April 4 in order to allocate the correct amount of space.

Thanks much for your time!
Jimmy McArthur

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